About the exhibit: To someone without a home living on the streets, the bustling city becomes one united exterior. "City Inside Out", explores a world that lacks interiors. Entering any doorway opens onto yet another exterior. Some pedestrians throw coins into the beggars’ hats, others bark insults to their faces. Joggers, dog walkers, groups of boisterous friends, clean people in new clothes, romantic couples, cell phone conversations, shiny traffic, wash their daily tides of health and prosperity past the homeless. Late each night, the people living on the streets are confronted by another kind of crowd, dangerous as the sharp knife and gun. They are defenseless, even within their own bodies. Sensations abound, prickly as lice and poisonous insect infested clothing, blurry as sight without glasses, with ringing ears of imaginary voices, and resignation to untreated illness. The survival test is administered without consideration for those who will see the next day.

Built on three levels, the eroding exteriors infuse themselves into the air space of the sky, onto the land of perpetual traffic, and below the land, completing the dominance of the harsh realities into every possible corner. The unbelievable stories of these people are hung out to dry in the wind.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

As you move across the room, the perspective in the mirror also changes just a bit.
Very simple technology - no scripting, just use of space and illusion.

How do you make a mirror in three dimensions within a
virtual world without reflection? A couple years ago, I experimented with that
illusion. It turns out to be very simple: First, choose a location in a room
where you can have a lot of hidden space behind a wall (depending on the
illusion of depth you wish to achieve, say up to around 2 or 3 meters). Create
a hollow in that wall the size you want your mirror to be. Place a hollowed-out
half sphere behind the mirror opening. The circumference should be a couple
times larger than the opening (this interior curved surface is where you will apply
your ‘reflected image’). Join the rim of the half sphere to the back side of
the wall. Center it. The next part is fun. Take a picture of the opposite side of the
room. Apply that picture onto the inside of the hollowed sphere. Then, because
a mirror reflects backwards, reverse your image on that prim. Play around with
the controls in your Edit window to properly align the picture. Place a glass
texture of your choice over the wall opening to complete the mirror (I used a
dirty glass texture). Since the half sphere is quite a bit larger than the
mirror opening in the wall, it gives a convincing illusion of reflection
because you cannot see the edges of the interior image as you walk past the mirror, or cam around the room. As you walk in front of
the mirror, the scene inside changes perspective similarly (though not
identically) to a mirror in real life. Of course… you will not see your own
reflection. This brings me to the second part of the process. In my first try at creating a mirror (which you can see at the Cabinet of Curiosities on the ACC Alpha sim),
I placed a centaur holding a fallen man before the mirror. Next, I made a
reverse copy of the couple inside the mirror, and faced them looking at each
other: one inside the mirror, the other outside. For the piece at ACC Alpha, I
put a poetic twist on it. Instead of mirroring the exact scene, where the
centaur looks into the face of the man on our side of the mirror, I turned the
head forward on the reflected copy, to look directly at you, the viewer. This
heightens the interactivity of the piece, even if it is only subliminal.

Since constructing the avenue of greenhouses that leads up
to Centaurs’ Hall (on the Verdigris sim), I wanted to think of something unusual to complete the
build. Yesterday, I felt a nook in one of the small greenhouses lining that
avenue called Poetry Way, was an ideal location to make another mirror. As
mentioned in a previous post, I built Centaurs’ Hall across from Vintage
Village. (That village, which Oriolus Oliva built many years ago, is so
beautiful, that any view of it, and at any angle is like a classical painting).
I remembered a picture I’d taken a couple days earlier of the view onto Vintage
Village. The perspective was right for this room. I pulled up a wash basin
right below the mirror, and photographed it, then applied its mirrored image onto the glass
pane of the mirror as a nearby reflection. This layering of nearby objects and
a distanced scene increases the effectiveness of the illusion. The one inconsistency with the picture I chose, is that my avatar was sitting in a chair contained
within the photo. Since I cannot be sitting in that chair 24/7 to complete the
illusion when visitors arrive, I almost decided to take another photo of the
view without my avatar in the shot. But on second thought, I liked keeping it as is for
two reasons: 1. It’s like a signature of the artist. Artists often painted their
own faces onto characters in classical scenes as a kind of signature. 2. I hope
seeing an avatar sitting on a chair in the reflection will encourage viewers to
take the hint, and sit themselves in the chairs - and thus, at least to some degree, completing the illusion of an avatar reflected. These are special old green
wooden chairs made by the skilled builder Robin Sojourner. See the flower on
the little table before the chairs? When you sit, and get a menu, click to
draw, and you will receive a pencil, and a sketch of a flower you are drawing.
(They don’t clutter your inventory. They disappear when you stand up). You can
also drink some coffee, or read a book. I did read the book by the way, because
Robin includes a notecard of Beauty and the Beast, of which she rewrote her
version for us. If you come by for some coffee, to read a story, or to draw, I
hope you will not find me rude, as my back in the mirror is always facing away
from you. I am simply daydreaming on to the view of Vintage Village.

A LIGHTHOUSE OF INTENSE COLOR

Painting of "Cellist" by Bamboo Barnes.

A couple days before building the mirror, I had converted
one of the lone greenhouses along Poetry Way into a bright beacon. It’s called
the Contrapuntal Lighthouse, not only because it stands like a lighthouse above
the strait, sectioning the two isles of Verdigris, but because it emits light
by virtue of the texture inside. In fact, I believe it is the brightest spot at
the Centaurs’ Hall parcel. The texture in question, a painting called “Cellist”
is by the artist Bamboo Barnes. She photographed my cellist statue at ACC Alpha
(in the Maze Gardens), then imbued the subject with her thrilling sense of
color and harmony. The theme is the cello. When I think of that instrument, the
composer Bach comes to mind almost automatically. His contrapuntal music
(layering of two or more melodies over each other played simultaneously for
enriched harmony) seemed an appropriate concept to apply to the building, since
the main ingredient of the build is the painting by Barnes, itself richly
layered in color. To complete the lighthouse, I made a new and quite altered variation
of the cellist statue as the finial atop the dome.